I received a followup question to my post about registering 11179 items in the Colectica Repository. This question involves working with the Colectica SDK and its DDI model in conjunction with the Repository.

How do I connect to the Repository and retrieve a DdiInstance, such as the YourDdiInstance() method in your previous post?

First we will create the repository client. In this example we will use the built in Active Directory authentication and send the credentials of the user running the program (The user who asked the question uses the Active Directory authentication and roles). Notice the username and password are not specified as they were in the example from my previous post.

If we know the item’s identification, we can retrieve the item. If not, we can perform a search on the repository. The basic GetItem has many variations with different processing options, retrieving item lists, and sets of relationships. The simple GetItem and GetLatestItem are shown below.

To make it extremely easy to work with DDI items in the Colectica Repository, we will wrap this client with additional methods using the DdiClient. This also avoids the type checking and casting if you want to access properties of the DdiInstance not present on IVersionable. There are also similar methods for each DDI item type as the one shown below!

The client calls allow controlling how child items are populated. If we have an unpopulated DdiInstance, we can use a similar method call to fill it with data and find its children.

// an unpopulated item with its identification. Children items
// may come back from the client as unpopulated depending on
// the child processing that is selected. Here is an example of
// how to populate such an item with the client
DdiInstance instance = new DdiInstance()
{
Identifier = id,
AgencyId = agency,
Version = version,
IsPopulated = false
};
// Populate the Ddi Instance
ddiClient.PopulateDdiInstance(instance,
false, ChildReferenceProcessing.Instantiate);
// Or as shown in Update 1 of my other post, populate the entire
// item hierarchy from the Repository
GraphPopulator populator = new GraphPopulator(client);
instance.Accept(populator);
// Do something with the instance
foreach(StudyUnit study in instance.StudyUnits)
{
//.....
}